Slide 22: Wiki Culture

Enough about mechanics; how is a wiki actually used ? Well, that's really up to you, but there are a number of tricks that the wiki community has developed for collaborative writing that work pretty well:

What can I edit?

Anything. But it's good etiquette to sign your contributions

If someone doesn't want you to edit a page, it's up to them to say so, clearly, on the page

But what if somebody doesn't like my edits?

In TWiki, they can always recover the old revision and re-instantiate it if they really want to

Otherwise they should regard your changes as an opportunity for discussion

Pages in wiki are (usually) in one of three "modes"

DocumentMode

ThreadMode

StructuredMode

TWiki doesn't automatically distinguish between these modes; they are purely semantic.

Slide 23: DocumentMode

A page in DocumentMode usually comprises a contribution which is written in the third person and left unsigned.

The piece of text is community property

It may have multiple and changing authors as it is updated to reflect the community consensus.

Slide 24: ThreadMode

Thread mode is a form of discussion where the community holds a conversation

The discussion usually starts out with a statement, at the top of the page, that is subsequently discussed

The page may be periodically "refactored" (edited) to remove some of the comments

As long as the comment is accurately reflected in what replaces it, nobody usually minds.

Remember to always maintain a complete list of contributors, though!

You may see a comment box on a page in ThreadMode that makes it easy to quickly add your inputs. Typing in a comment and adding it to a page this way is known as "blogging"

ThreadMode is rather like an e-mail thread

Except that new comments are usually added to the end

ThreadMode pages often get refactored into DocumentMode

Slide 25: StructuredMode

A page in StructuredMode follows some predefined structure for example

An agenda

A set of meeting minutes

A requirement description.

Pages in StructuredMode will usually have rules governing how they are edited.

Slide 26: Other Wiki tricks - Categories

A Wiki trick for grouping pages together

Example: to group together a set of pages all relating to the weather:

Create a page called 'CategoryWeather'

Put a SEARCH that contains the word 'CategoryWeather' into it

%SEARCH{"CategoryWeather" nosearch="on" nosummary="on"}%

Put the BumpyWord 'CategoryWeather' on all the pages relating to the weather(usually at the bottom, below a horizontal bar)

Slide 27: Contributed features

Basic TWiki is rich with features, but is enriched even further by the addition of optional plug-in modules that may (or may not!) be installed in your TWiki. These are classified as either skins (modules that change the look-and-feel) and plugins (modules that enhance functionality).

Here's a brief description of some of the more common plugins, together with the tags you might expect to see in topics if they are used. You can find out more by visiting the plugin pages.

AutoCompletePlugin: Auto-complete for input fields of forms

CalendarPlugin: Show a monthly calendar with highlighted events %CALENDAR...%

CommentPlugin: Support rapid entry of short comments (also known as blogging) %COMMENT...